Posted On:July 2016 - AppFerret

Big Data integration software company Talend on Thursday raised about $95 million in a closely watched IPO that is just the second one from a Bay Area tech company this year.

American Depositary Shares in the Redwood City company, which has roots in France, opened its first day of trading (NASDAQ:TLND) Friday up more than 50 percent.

The company late on Thursday priced 5.25 million shares at $18, above the target range of between $15 and $17 it set earlier this month. Underwriters have the option to buy an additional 787,500, so the final tally on money raised could approach $110 million.

It opened at $27.66 and traded between $25 and $28 in early trading after CEOMike Tuchen rang the opening bell on the Nasdaq exchange in New York.

The only other IPO in the region was by San Francisco-based cloud communications business Twilio, which raised $150 million last month and whose stock (NYSE:TWLO) has nearly tripled since.

Many observers believe that a strong showing by Talend, following close on the heels of Twilio’s success, could convince others waiting in the wings to make the leap.

Talend is the seventh tech IPO of 2016, according to Renaissance Capital, which said the average return of the previous six this year has topped 70 percent.

CEO Tuchen issued a statement about his company’s IPO that emphasized Talend has a long way to go to fully capitalize on the market it is addressing. Spending on software that connects and integrates data is expected grow to as much $21 billion in 2019, according to industry research firm IDC.

Talend last year lost $22 million on revenue of $76 million, compared to a $22.5 million loss on revenue of $62.6 million in 2014.

It has more than 1300 customers worldwide, including Air France, Citi, General Electric and Travis Perkins.

“We’re looking forward to maximizing the opportunity we have in front of us and building our business for long-term success,” Tuchen said.

Before going public, Talend raised more than $100 million from investors who included Galileo Partners, Balderton Capital, Idinvest Partners, Iris Capital and Silver Lake Partners.

We now have our presidential candidates, and for the next few months you get to hear about the changing probability of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump winning the election. As of this writing,the Upshot estimates a 68% probability for Clinton and 32% for Donald Trump. FiveThirtyEight estimates 52% and 48% for Clinton and Trump, respectively. Forecasts are kind of all over the place this far out from November. Plus, the numbers aren’t especially accurate post-convention.

But the probabilities will start to converge and grow more significant.

So what does it mean when Clinton has a 68% chance of becoming president? What if there were a 90% chance that Trump wins?

Some interpret a high percentage as a landslide, which often isn’t the case with these election forecasts, and it certainly doesn’t mean the candidate with a low chance will lose. If this were the case, the Cleveland Cavaliers would not have beaten the Golden State Warriors, and I would not be sitting here hating basketball.

Fiddle with the probabilities in the graphic simulation here to see what I mean.

Even when you shift the probability far left or far right, the opposing candidate still gets some wins. That doesn’t mean a forecast was wrong. That’s just randomness and uncertainty at play.

The probability estimates the percentage of times you get an outcome if you were to do something multiple times. In the case of Clinton’s 68% chance, run an election hundreds of times, and the statistical model that spit out the percentage thinks that Clinton wins about 68% of those theoretical elections. Conversely, it thinks Trump wins 32% of them.

So as we get closer to election day, even if there’s a high probability for one candidate over the other, what I’m saying is — there’s a chance.

From fashion to food to healthcare, IBM’s Watson has many guises across different industries. Here’s a look at some of the work IBM’s AI system has been doing since its Jeopardy! heyday.

After defeating Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings in a game of Jeopardy! in 2011, IBM’s Watson couldn’t survive on its $77,147 in winnings. Unlike Microsoft’s Cortana and Apple’s Siri, Watson lacked a parent willing to let it continue living in the basement rent-free, so it got a paying job in healthcare, helping insurer Wellpoint and doctors by providing treatment advice.

Since then, and following investments of more than $1 billion, Watson has become a machine-of-all-trades. Through a combination of machine learning, natural language processing, and a variety of other technologies, Watson is helping companies across a broad spectrum of businesses. Beyond healthcare, Watson earns its keep in fashion, hospitality, food, gaming, retail, financial services, and veterinary medicine.

Its latest engagement involves protecting computers from its own kind. On Tuesday, IBM announced Watson for Cyber Security, a role that comes with residence in the cloud, instead of the Power 750 systems it inhabits on corporate premises.

This fall, Watson, with the assistance of researchers at eight universities, will begin learning to recognize cyber-security threats in the hope that its cognitive capabilities will help identify malicious code and formulate mitigation strategies. The core of its training data will come from IBM’s X-Force research library, which includes data on 8 million spam and phishing attacks, as well as more than 100,000 vulnerabilities.

IBM believes that Watson’s ability to understand unstructured data makes it well-suited for malware hunting. The firm said that 80% of all Internet data is unstructured, and that the typical organization makes use of only about 8% of this data. Given AI’s already considerable role in fraud detection, it wouldn’t be surprising to see Watson excel in cyber-security.

Marc van Zadelhoff, general manager of IBM Security, sees Watson as an answer to the cyber-security talent shortage. “Even if the industry was able to fill the estimated 1.5 million open cyber-security jobs by 2020, we’d still have a skills crisis in security,” he said in a statement.

So robots, of a sort, are taking jobs. But this may be for the best, since the work of processing more than 15,000 security documents a month, according to IBM, would be rather a chore.

At the same time, Watson will benefit from free labor, in the form of job training provided by students at the eight universities involved with the project.

You, too, may see Watson or something similar working in your industry. It won’t be a particularly social colleague, but at least it will get you those reports you need on time.

The idea behind AppFerret is a simple idea: to provide a system that connects Software Developers that build server-class software with Clients that need help solving real-world problems; sometimes really Big problems.

This is an exciting time, a golden age of amazing developments in software and computing resources like cloud computing. But how do you sort through all of the options, are even find out what options exist?